Roy's opened in 1938 as a gas station and café. As business grew, Crowl added a motel and expanded the facilities to meet the demands of Route 66 traffic — the stream of travelers, truckers, and migrants crossing the Mojave on the only reliable paved road between Los Angeles and the Colorado River. On February 1, 1959, the neon boomerang sign went up: a distinctive piece of mid-century roadside design that became one of the most photographed signs on the American highway system.

At its peak, Roy's employed seventy people from Amboy and the surrounding area. The café served food at all hours. The motel rooms filled and emptied with the rhythm of transcontinental travel. The gas station kept vehicles moving across a stretch of desert where running out of fuel was a serious proposition. The sign glowed in the desert night, visible for miles.

Before the bypass, the famous came through like everyone else — because there was no other route. Harrison Ford was among them, arriving by small plane at the Amboy Airfield, one of California's earliest general aviation airports, which sat adjacent to the town. Brad Pitt shot scenes for Kalifornia in the area in 1993, two decades after the bypass. The desolation that the bypass had created was itself a draw for filmmakers who needed the Mojave to look abandoned.

Bob Dylan came and painted the Roy's sign. Olivia Rodrigo filmed there in 2022. The accumulation of famous names in a town this small reflects something about what Roy's had become after the interstate arrived: not a working roadside stop but an icon of a road that no longer carried traffic, a monument to the highway culture that preceded the freeway era.

Roy's changed hands multiple times after Crowl. On May 3, 2005, Albert Okura — the founder of the Juan Pollo restaurant chain — purchased the entire town of Amboy, including Roy's, for $425,000. Okura's acquisition attracted significant media attention: the idea of buying a ghost town, sign and all, appealed to something in the cultural imagination of people who had driven past it for years.

Okura's ownership stabilized the property. Roy's continued to operate as a gas station and café, serving the Route 66 enthusiasts, photographers, and curious travelers who make the detour specifically to see the sign and the desolate town around it. The business model has changed — visitors come to see what it is, not to stop because they have to — but the sign still illuminates the desert night.

Amboy exists in a landscape that gives it two identities: the Route 66 stop, with its sign and café and human-scaled nostalgia, and the geological anomaly, with its cinder cone and lava field sitting a few miles away. Amboy Crater's dark basalt is visible from the highway; the two features share a kind of notoriety in the eastern Mojave — both are things that people make specific trips to see.

The Amboy Airfield, which Harrison Ford used and which once served the town's practical needs, is a reminder that small desert communities required infrastructure that the rest of the country took for granted. Roads, airports, water, fuel: all of it had to be brought to a place that the desert offered nothing except space and, in this case, a remarkable view of a volcano.